...and taking names (4)

The most recent of Jamie Smith's published works is a fine little volume entitled, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church. I found the expositions of recent films that opened each chapter a fitting tribute to Francis Schaeffer, not to mention a fine practice of cultural interpretation. But quite beyond this fitting structural element, the book is a welcome argument for the current ecclesiastical milieu.

...and taking names (3)

Having indicated my suspicions that a Leibnizian-Deleuzian ontology offers itself to as many slippery slopes as a Platonic one, it is now time to turn attention to the heart of Smith’s creational ontology. I indicated that the basic attempt at a creational ontology is brought into question by two ontological events and an array of biblical aesthetic. Before I arrive at these three, let us consider the most valuable element of Smith’s argument against Radical Orthodoxy (RO).

The real value of Jamie Smith’s argument for creational ontology is that he attempts to affirm the goodness of the body, which has suffered at the hands of many theologians. The current spike in interest in theology of the body is welcome, even if the scholarship is a bit flat. One does feel that there is often a rather uncritical acceptance or else a deep paranoia of the body and its passions in Christian theology. It is not often that one finds a middle ground. Although I did not grow up in a fundamentalist tradition, a mutation of Reformed evangelicalism did exercise its influence at a crucial point in my faith development. Often enough in such a tradition the body, especially the sexual body, is feared or otherwise to be tamed and broken for the sake of the [s]pirit. Smith, having grown up in similar circles, has exactly this kind of negative appraisal of the body in his sights when he loads the ammunition for his creational ontology. One gets the feeling that it is not so much materiality, but the body in particular (as proposed microcosm of the entire material order) that drives Smith’s campaign. And so it seems the closer we come to this issue the more we penetrate to the core of Smith’s argument.

...and taking names (2)

Another of Jamie Smith's remarkable achievements is his fine introduction to Radical Orthodoxy (RO). Introducing Radical Orthodoxy is the best overall introduction to the themes and major figures of RO. An added bonus of the volume is the interaction Smith develops between RO and the continental Reformed tradition. One particular aspect of RO with which Smith expresses some reservation from his Reformed perspective is RO's "participatory ontology."

Whether it is best described as a movement, a school, a sensibility, or a book series, RO presents a politics (socialism), based on an epistemology (illumination), funded by an ontology (suspension). All of this is presented as a counter to a post/modern ontology (nihilism), with its faulty epistemology and agonistic politics. In the programmatic volume, Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, editors Milbank, Pickstock, and Ward single out the "suspension of the material" as the turn of Radical Orthodoxy. This turn of RO depends on an Augustinian Platonism, filtered through the Cambridge Platonists. In essence (!), RO espouses a view of the material that grounds every instance of immanence in transcendence. Only if the immanent participates in a reality beyond itself can its existence really be guaranteed. Another way of putting it is to say only a Christian (Platonist) can truly be a materialist without devolving into nihilism. While Smith applauds RO's defense of the project of metaphysics, he is not a great fan of the Platonic ontology RO employs (probably in part because he suffers from the Reformed allergy to the analogy of being, on which see millinerd's post).

...and taking names (1)

A good friend of mine in the homiletics doctoral program at Vanderbilt has some fondness for Jamie Smith's work. In fact, a cadre of the Vanderbilt graduate students in religion apparently nicknamed him "Kick Ass" after his official literary moniker: James K(ick). A(ss). Smith.

I confess that I, too, enjoy Smith's work. Well...some of it. Speech and Theology is an exquisite little book, for instance. The subtitle is inspired: Language and the Logic of the Incarnation. Smith's central focus is the philosophical possibility of theology, of speaking about God. The question he presents is how it is possible to speak about that which resists language. Since concepts are inadequate to the transcendent thing (they are not the thing signified by the concept),“what we are looking for is a ‘third way,’ a mode of speaking which is non-conceptual, non-objectifying, and non-predicative—and therefore non-reductive and non-violent. It will be what we might describe as ‘praise’ (Augustine, Marion) or ‘de-nomination’ (Marion), ‘prayer’ (Derrida), or Augustine’s strategy of ‘confession.’ (44)” In fact, language functions incarnationally, to incarnate the signified in the sign. This is similar to Marion's idea of the icon. In incarnational logic, the transcendent appears in the immanent and yet remains transcendent.